Fox Webifies Dollhouse and Fringe

Fox has announced that its upcoming shows Dollhouse and Fringe will air with reduced commercial breaks. Each break will be shorter and feature fewer advertisers, bringing the total amount of national commercial time for each program to just five minutes. But while Fox is calling the move “Remote-Free TV,” it seems to be “more like web TV.”

The network said the commercial decrease was a way to keep people from changing the channel, but faced with declining audiences and a generation of viewers watching content on their laptops, emulating video sites like Hulu (which Fox is is part of) with fewer ads and advertisers might be the way to keep the kids from abandoning TV altogether.

This was the third nudge towards a more webified TV experience offered up by a network this week. Turner announced its TVinContext to serve up more content-based relevant advertisements during its programs, and CBS partnered with EQAL to extend the TV storytelling experience to the web.